Mali Obomsawin and Jake Blount Live Humble

Mali Obomsawin is a bassist, composer, improviser and citizen of Abenaki First Nation (Odanak); Jake Blount is a multi-instrumentalist interpreter of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Earlier this fall, Mali and Jake released a record together, symbiont, via Smithsonian Folkways. Per Mali: “Jake and I have zoomed out to look at the greater landscape of colonization in the ‘U.S.’ — putting Black folk with Indigenous folk expressions. We have put our communities and ancestors in dialogue, pointed to historic moments of overlapping, parallel, and contrasting experiences under American colonialism. I hope this album generates lots of conversations about those stories, our ability to reclaim narratives and reconcile into a future embedded with solidarity and collective knowledge.” Here, the two have their own conversation about the record, and more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Mali Obomsawin: What’s up, Jake?

Jake Blount: Not much. You know, we’ve been texting constantly. [Laughs.] Where are you? 

Mali: Great question. I’m in somewhere remote, upstate New York — with limited Wi-Fi, so sorry if I glitch out. I’m at a retreat that is supposedly stewarded by Esperanza Spalding, although she hasn’t showed up yet.

Jake: That’s cool.

Mali: Yeah. It’s a bunch of Native and Black artists and creatives who are all here, presumably, to have conversations about the solidarity work we’re doing. But it kind of seems like we’re just here and the conversations are going to be natural, and not like a moderated, pitching questions [format]. 

Jake: That’s good. Organic relationships are nice.

Mali: Yeah, I feel like that’s the way to do it.

Jake: Well, I’m excited about this record we put out.

Mali: Me too. I feel like you go through that phase with a record where you’re making it and you’re like, This is the coolest thing ever. And then your imposter syndrome and self-loathing kicks in and you’re like, This is the worst thing ever. But I think I’m coming back around — I’m excited to start playing the shows, because it will remind everyone how much work we put into this and how sick it is. But that cycle is just cycling.

Jake: Oh, always. I feel like every time I make something, I go through that, like, four times.

Mali: Yeah, totally. And then once it’s out, you can let it go because you’re like, Let the people decide.

Jake: Exactly. It’s out of my hands at this point. Now I just need to find out what a bunch of journalists think about it, which is always a mixed bag in the type of work that we are doing.

Mali: Totally. It’s hard because you don’t want to overexplain to the media what your art is about. Or at least I have a hard time with that. And we’ve kind of discussed it: you don’t want to hold their hands too much, but you also can’t trust that this media that analyzes American folk music will necessarily be a trustworthy recipient without guidance. 

Jake: It is always tricky. It’s interesting working in this old repertoire — you know, we’re working with old traditional stuff, and even in the newer arrangement things that we’re doing, it’s derived from those sounds — and I think one of the interesting things to take note of is how, both for this album and for my last album, I felt like there were people who just didn’t do the basic work of looking up a song or thinking about what I was doing before they write about it on the public record, in kind of big publications. I do these exhaustive liner notes giving all of my sources on everything that I do, and people would just ignore those and misattribute the song — usually to a white person.

Mali: Oh, man, that’s egregious.

Jake: Yeah, right?

Mali: Like, “You know the whole point of what I do, right?” [Laughs.] That’s, like, line two of your bio. 

Jake: [Laughs.] Yes. And we’ve had a little bit of that with this album, where it’s been like, “OK, this person walked in with their expectation of what was going to happen and then ignored what the album actually was because it didn’t fit.”

Mali: Right. I mean, I hate to talk shit — but, you know I love to talk shit. But even when we were sharing the album for the first time and I was like, “Who can guess where this, the most well-known Native song, is from?” Someone was just like, “… Navajo?” I was like, What? Like, what do you mean, “from Navajo”? People really expose themselves with their lack of knowledge of the basic vernacular that we are participating in.

Jake: I don’t want to talk shit, but at the same time, I feel like for people to professionally put themselves in the role of explaining people’s music to the public, and then not do the work of informing themselves about the music, is something that needs to be talked about in the context of what we’re doing. Because we got one review that was just talking about, “The throughline of the album is Indigenous sounds.” And I was like, first of all, what does that mean? And second of all, I know for a fact that you’re talking about the African percussion things that I used, and you don’t understand what they are. In that whole review of this album — which is mostly made up of Black spirituals — they never mentioned Black people even one time. And that was one of the first reviews we got. It was very demoralizing. All the other ones have been better, but…

Mali: Yeah. I mean, the thesis statement of our work is correcting the historical record, right? And then people are just putting out more incorrect record. They’re just adding to the canon that we’re fighting against. [Laughs.] Well, I have a question for you. We’re starting to get questions about futurism, and how this sort of folds into the futurist lore and mythology. But I wonder how you engaged with that on your last record, bringing ancient songs into futuristic contexts, and how you feel like that is different from this record?

Jake: I think that for me, part of the biggest difference is that The New Faith really has a definite timeline where it is clear based on what the album is and the presentation of the album that it is, in fact, taking place in the distant future, and the songs have been transported into that future. I think the cooler thing about symbiont is just because of what it is, the timeline isn’t clear. It might not even be a line.

Mali: Hell yeah.

Jake: That’s, I think, one of the strengths of it — and one of the things that you brought to the table, because you were talking about not wanting to overexplain. I think because I am anxious about people not paying attention in the way that we’ve been talking about, sometimes I make things too clear in an attempt to control the narrative. You gave me the confidence to just be like, “I’m going to do it, and who gets it will get it…” But I’m curious for you, because we had a brief conversation about this — I’m coming at this from kind of an Afrofuturist perspective, which means, yes, you’re envisioning versions of the future that may not necessarily match one-to-one with the traditional sci-fi narratives of what the future is, because those so often assume uncritically the continued expansion of Western economic and governance systems throughout space. And so much of Afrofuturism is like, “It doesn’t even work here. Why would it work across the entire galaxy?” That’s in there for sure, but you articulated some really interesting differences between how futurism works for you and how it works for me. 

Mali: Well, first off, I feel like a commonality between your last record and this one is the idea that the folk songs survive the apocalypse, period. Because we’re putting them in this context of whatever happened, and now we’re in a desolate time, in both records. So from an Indigenous perspective where we already did survive our apocalypse and we do have the folk songs that were the most important to us to keeping the people alive, to remembering our history, the important lesson in the context of our album is: live humble. That’s one of the most important lessons, and if the people don’t teach you that, life will teach you that. Humble yourself. Don’t try to play god. 

I think that lesson in itself is important in the case of Indigenous futurisms too, so to speak. Our attachment to place as Native people, and knowing that we already survived the apocalypse, means that in the distant future of futurism, we see ourselves here in the same place. And so in that way, we’re just in another cycle — and that sort of points toward non-linear time, like you talked about. Whereas I think a lot of Afrofuturism is oriented toward the galaxy, I think Native people remain rooted in place and we see ourselves as part of this great time loop of struggle and stability. 

Jake: Yeah. It’s funny, I definitely have always been not super compelled by space narratives. One of the things that really made me think hard about this was Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, which involves other creatures coming from space, but not us. It defies all assumptions about the good aliens or the bad aliens. It’s very interesting.

Mali: Right. The thing, though, for a lot of Native nations, including my own: we came from space. Like, we already came from there. We landed here, and we were born through a variety of means that placed us at our exact location of our territorial coordinates. So space is there for us, but it already happened.

Jake: I think one of the things that is striking to me, just as a resonance in Afrofuturism in space, is that in the same way you’re talking about having survived the apocalypse and still being here, the difference for Black American people is that it wasn’t like an apocalypse — Africa kept going, and what was happening here in all of its mess kept going — but we got displaced and stripped of everything. So it’s more like it feels like you got taken off your planet. I would be far from the first to say this, but so much of the traditional sci-fi tropes of the alien invasion by a technologically advanced outsider bent on taking everything you have, or the abduction into a ship for experimentation, is just white people indulging in their fear that someone else will do to them what they did to everybody else. 

Mali: Yes. 

Jake: It’s been funny to think about the future simply because I’ve always been so averse to the traditional sci-fi depictions of it, in a way that feels like a cycle. I mean, part of the idea for The New Faith was, we were thinking about a future where there’s been this technological regression because everything fell apart. And we already know in Black American folk music that a lot of that repertoire was built around instrumentation, like drums for example, that were then outlawed for Black people in this country. So there’s already been this pattern of, bring the songs over and then destroy or prohibit the technology that the songs were built around, and then them taking a new shape. So it was a short step for me to be like, “OK, well, what happens when the computers and the synthesizers are gone, and then everything has to take a new shape again?” I think symbiont was really fun in the way that it takes place at an unknown point in time. We didn’t have technological restraints to work with.

Mali: It’s kind of like a salvaging, which I think is very post-apocalyptic. And I think that is what would happen, and what has happened. When our societies are destroyed, we’re like, “OK, I’m going to use this piece of drywall and this random copper wire I found, and how about this aloe plant? Sure, yeah. We’ll make something work.”

Jake: Exactly. What’s interesting to me in this conversation is that, clearly in the indefinite timeline of this, it’s living in different places for you and for me. Like, I don’t think of it being post-apocalypse — I think of it being like pre- or peri-apocalypse. Like we’re on the brink of something, not that it’s already happened.

Mali: Well, isn’t capitalism just a constant wave of apocalypses, though?

Jake: It’s true. I have always had an ambivalent relationship with the term “apocalypse” because I think it implies a finality that isn’t usually there. 

Mali: Right. I don’t really associate it with that.

Jake: I think people with The New Faith were like, “Oh, it’s post-apocalyptic.” And I was like, “Well, it’s not apocalyptic because there’s still people here.” To me, there’s this thing with the apocalypse where it’s never here, because we’re still here. And I feel like that’s part of what frustrates me about our response to the climate crisis, or the many climate crises, is that we’re always waiting to get to the crisis point. It never arrives, even though everything’s already being destroyed. 

Mali: Right. It’s like we’re waiting for a moment, but our lives are a string of moments, and they keep coming.

Jake: Oh, do they ever keep coming. [Laughs.] 

Mali: Back to something that you were saying earlier: I think short of completely wiping out your population, the worst thing that you can do to people is to strip them of their identity. I do think that represents a kind of apocalypse, culturally at least, that I think both of our communities through art and resistance and culture-making and world-building have responded to in a productive way. I feel like another point of this record, for me at least, is shining a light on, in spite of apocalyptic conditions, what our ancestors passed forward to us because they saw the lack that was created by colonialism and theft.

Jake: Yeah. I feel like my orientation toward this has changed a little bit lately, especially because I read this article called “Zombie Biopolitics” by this scholar Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. One of my favorite things about it was it talked about the cultural mechanism of the plantation system trying to strip people of their identity, their culture, their kinship, their traditions — yada, yada, yada, we’ve been down this road before — and the fact that doing those things created a new common ground on which people could build a new identity. It reformatted things for me, because I think so often when we talk about Black folk music — and I’m sure this is also true on some level of Indigenous music, and any other tradition — whenever we’re Black or brown people, everything that we have of worth is something that was passed down to us by somebody else, not something we created. And I think for Black American people, this usually takes the form of when people study our music, they try to figure out which pieces came from Africa and which pieces came from Europe, and aren’t attentive to the fact that we built a new thing here.

Mali: Yeah.

Jake: What I have come to embrace about that — and this is controversial with some of my colleagues, who may feel really differently about art forms or foodways or whatever that developed during enslavement, and feel like isn’t from us — to me, our culture didn’t survive the social death machinations of the plantation system. We died and then came back as something different. Which is part of the reason why the symbiont framework is so exciting to me, because in addition to troubling the exact location and linear time, it’s taking these songs and putting them simultaneously in the realm of the living and the dead, which I think is how all of that music has to be understood anyway.

Mali: I totally agree. Myself — and Native people, I think, in general — we have a very positive relationship with our predecessors, a very reverent relationship with our ancestors, and a grateful one. And also, we feel a responsibility to our future descendants. Being in conversation with the living and the dead and the not-yet-born — I feel like I can’t go outside and not be in conversation with all of those people, all of those spirits. And not to get woo-y on you, but I do think that by stepping into the lineage of folk musics, we are a link in the DNA that continues forward and backwards. 

Jake: Oh, absolutely. That’s how I’ve always thought about making records, for Folkways especially — which I know you started doing before I did, and I would be curious to know if you thought about it the same way. But when they came to me to ask me to make an album — and that first album was The New Faith — I was like, What do I want to leave behind for somebody? The entire process behind me coming up with the idea for that record was, Yeah, I could make another string band album, but they have 50 of those. What can I do that is my unique contribution here, that I can leave in this government archive that will ostensibly survive in some way, shape, or form for at least a couple centuries? What can I leave there for somebody else to track down in the future? 

Mali: Absolutely. We talked explicitly about that when we were thinking about this record, too — like pointing listeners toward other things in the archive, and in other archives. On the record, we’re like, “We need to look closer at this 17th century banjo tune,” or closer at this tradition, just as a clue. I think a lot of us who are into the research side of things are kind of on a treasure hunt for more knowledge of the times and contexts that we emerged from, the histories that led to us.

Jake: It’s a fascinating thing to be working on this stuff in the way and the place that we are. It never is uncomplicated. I wonder all the time about that — what is the archive doing? And what am I doing by participating? I just don’t know.

Mali: There’s no part of me that is unperturbed by participating in the archive. And Smithsonian — I mean, it’s part of the government, first of all. Full stop. Second stop, repatriation of ancestral remains, ancestral knowledges and artifacts… that’s ongoing. It’s complicated, too. 

Jake: Yes. 

Mali: But when I first signed with Folkways, with Lula Wiles, I was not as intentional about it. I was like, “Oh, sweet, we get the stamp of approval from the apparatus of American folk music. That’s cool.” Even though we were writing contemporary songs. But I very quickly did realize at least the power of documentation that I had. So I was glad to be adding to the canon of protest songs. But also, I think where it really inspired me was in the liner notes, where they asked us to write some notes for the record, and I was like, Oh, I’m going to write a full-on essay about colonialism in my words, because that needs to be here. I don’t want anyone to digest this Lula Wiles album without my full take on how terrible the United States is, and has been.

Jake: Yeah. What year did you do the record with Lula Wiles?

Mali: That record was, like, 2018. I was a child!

Jake: I was thinking — I had a lot of, I would say, difficulty figuring out how to present things, because I feel like when you bring up the US government right now… I’m trying to engage the problematic piece of what all of these institutions are and do in the work, but I’ve had trouble dealing with it because I feel like anytime you voice a criticism of the US government now, it gets interpreted through the lens of the Trump presidency, or candidacy.

Mali: I know, it’s so toxic. As if the current president isn’t doing the same and more effectively bad shit, you know? It disables an analysis that sees America through the expanse of time and through its existence as a business for imperialism and capital.

Jake: Yeah. I remember talking years and years ago to one of my teachers — his band has a song that’s quite obviously critical of Reaganomics in the lyrics, and he was like, “You know, we sing the song, but if we bring it up in plain speech, the entire show becomes about that and the other nuances of what we’re talking about go away in people’s minds.” I didn’t get it at the time. And now I think because of Trump being in the picture and people really assigning all of the ills of this system that has existed for so long to one guy, I’m like, I can’t criticize him on stage or else every other piece of criticism I make on the stage gets assigned to him. Even though it’s bigger than him. I get it now. [Laughs.] 

Mali: Yeah, totally. The important thing — the throughline of the album to Trump, to Kamala Harris, to everyone in between — is we are in dialogue with a persistent colonial empire and imperial empire. That is where this all started, with the arrival of white people here and with the theft of African ancestors, and enslavement and everything that built toward these recent presidencies and climate change. It is all encapsulated in this global capitalist takeover, and I think that we’re seeing it now more than ever that the Earth is responding seismically to the fact that there’s very little left to take before everything breaks. So, I don’t know. In terms of nonlinear time and cyclical relationality, I feel like symbiont is doing what all of our ancestors have done, which is try to poke through the amnesia and the inaccurate stories being told, to puncture that with truth and some prominent teachings that might help us get through.

Jake: That was a perfect ending note that I’m not going to try to cap.

Mali: [Laughs.] Great.

Jake: Thanks, Mali. Enjoy the retreat.

Mali: Thanks, Jake. Bye!